GREG FARNDON

All artists are a reflection of the era in which they live. They are tempered, flavoured, moulded by the time of their living, they are a product of their times, and yet there is something more. An artist is a living entity, one that stands slightly askew from the norm, a creature that lives within a shift of perspective, of consciousness, someone that can see more than others, but also someone who can see less, both are supremely invaluable elements of what it means to be an artist.

An artist can see more because they can often see, recognise, and understand the mechanism of life, the framework that lies beneath the daily distractions of life, but they can also see less, not less as in understand less, but less as in interference. The ephemera of distraction is there, palpable, but it is also a mechanism, understand it as that and you can see through and around it.

That is a special gift and it is one that comes with the territory of being an artist, particularly of an artist living in this most peculiar and special of centuries.

The artist Greg Farndon is both observer and participator, both abstractive and integrator. He is able to pick out the layers of visual life that we now have identified ourselves with, our social media, our music, our literature, our film, all part of the contemporary language of our lives, the references that have become almost instinctual, part of the biology of our lives, and yet they are still surprisingly new. They are with us now, but also are part of the building blocks of future generations of language and understanding.

This fascinates and intrigues Greg, and rightly so. We live in extraordinary times, in ground-breaking transformative times. Everything is fluctuating around us as we move inexorably through these technologically led times. We are creatures steeped in suspicion and magic, in tragedy and wonder. We have traditions and understanding in the way things were, but nothing in the way things are to be, and that is the excitement for an artist like Greg.

To be in on the organic movement of life, to observe and to interpret and interject new forms of narrative, symbolism, reading, recording, language itself in fact, where the constancy of fundamental transformation becomes the everyday, these fill the compositions of the artist.

You cannot help but be mesmerised by the work of Greg Farndon, I defy you to be indifferent to the impact of his narrative. These pieces by Greg are at once measures of what is primal and futuristic, what is magical and everyday, but most importantly of all, they are the language and essence of where we are now, at this point in the twenty first century, the century of utter transformation, the one that will change our species from the bottom up.

These are the initial movements, the most important in our transformation, our next evolutional jump, which is why Gregs work is so important. His pieces are visual observations of the shifts in perspective, of his own, his culture, his species. They are a precious gift, as is the artist Greg Farndon and we are lucky that he is as intuitive and insightful as he is.

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